Tardebigge

Lovely quiet moorings last night directly opposite Lego Land. This morning the weather was miserable yet again,  this was looking back from our mooring, we did have a brief touch of a blue sky but then it all just turned to rain.
Once again Gas Street was empty of visiting boats as we turned at the Mail Box down the Worcester and Birmingham canal.

The amount of scaffolding in Birmingham at the moment is unbelievable, I suspect lots to to remove cladding from buildings.   One of the two boats moored across the water point yesterday has left and left all the bags of rubbish from his back deck on the towpath outside the service building.
Lots of work has taken place at University Rail Station since we were last this way and they have another canal closure planed for January when I expect they will be doing more heavy lifts over the canal and towpath. They have even put in a new bridge from the station to the university grounds. I do wonder how much ground the universities cover in Birmingham including student accommodations. Just after this we had a short stop to remove a small amount of polly and string from the prop, it wasn’t much but had a big effect on performance.
At Kings Norton Junction we went straight ahead towards Wast Hill tunnel passing this smartened up length of fencing, it was here that we met a hire boat, so that makes it an average of just one a day. Wast Hill Tunnel is wide enough for two boats to pass and 2726 yards long, CRT suggest it take an hour to traverse the length of it. We would have two more tunnels to traverse before we reached our moorings for the night, Shortwood at 613 yards which is only brick lined at each entrance, the rest being raw rock and then finally even shorter 580 yard Tardebigge tunnel. It is not far from the mouth of the tunnel to the top of the Tardebigge flight of 29 lock, but as we don’t plan to do them we winded and moored towpath side facing the tunnel.

Todays Journey 14¼ miles, no locks in 5½ hours